February 27, 2012

The Jewish National Fund (JNF), a British charity implicated in human rights violations in Israel, received yet another blow when Green Party of England and Wales members voted overwhelmingly to support an international call for action against JNF practices in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and to revoke its charity status in the UK.

Green Party member Deborah Fink, who is co-founder of Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, moved the motion on Sunday. Fink alerted the conference to “JNF greenwash” and said that “the Green Party stands for environmental and social justice, the upholding of human rights, is against racism and is officially in solidarity with the Palestinian people who have called for this campaign. The JNF is a major impediment to realisation of Green Party policy on the Middle East, therefore the JNF should be condemned. As a charity, the JNF gets tax advantages, so through our taxes, we are subsidising injustice”. The motion passed with no one speaking in opposition and with only three people voting against.

The Green Party endorsement of the Stop the JNF Campaigns comes after similar motions were passed last year by the Scottish Green Party and Scottish Friends of the Earth, all repudiating the JNF’s claim to be an “environmental charity”. The JNF is known for establishing forests and parks over the remains of destroyed Palestinian villages. Last year the JNF lost high level political protection when David Cameron resigned as Honorary Patron, the first time in its 111 year history the serving British Prime Minister does not hold this position. Equally unprecedentedly, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg declined the JNF’s request to become Patrons when they became leaders of their parties.

Terry Gallogly, Green Party member and an organiser of the Stop the JNF Campaign in the UK, welcomed the decision this weekend,

“Our government has stood by for over sixty years doing nothing, or directly complicit in Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights. The JNF is a key tool of Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing, operating as a para-statal organisation with powers over land administration.

“This decision, along with similar positions already taken by civil society organisations such as the Iona Community and trade unions, is a message to the JNF that their days are numbered – we won’t tolerate their abuse of charity status in the UK to fund a system of land theft and racism against Palestinians.”

Campaigners believe that another sign of the JNF’s increasing difficulty is the sixty-four MPs who have signed an Early Day Motion stating there is just cause to consider the revocation of the JNF's charitable status.

Notes:

1. Motion passed at the Green Party of England and Wales Spring conference on 26th February 2012* The Green Party of England and Wales condemns the Jewish National Fund for its activities in excluding non-Jews from Israeli land and denounces the organisation for claiming to be an ecological agency.* The GPEW endorses the international call for action against the JNF and supports efforts to revoke its charitable status in the UK.* The GPEW will add its name to the list of signatories of the 'Stop the JNF Campaign'.

2. The Stop the JNF Campaign is an international campaign aimed at ending the role of the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet LeIsrael) (JNF-KKL) in:- the on-going displacement of indigenous Palestinians from their land- the theft of their property- the funding of historic and present day colonies, and- the destruction of the natural environment.

The Jewish National Fund was established in 1901 by the World Zionist Organisation and mandated to obtain land for the sole use of persons of ‘Jewish faith, race or ancestry’. It was first registered in the UK, and has retained a fundraising and propaganda function in Britain since the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. Through its landholdings and its influence on the Israel Land Authority, the JNF controls 93% of the land in Israel on which it practices its ethnic exclusion policies.

The JNF continues to serve as a global fundraiser for Israeli ethnic cleansing, occupation and apartheid. Despite its role in a State institution of Israel (the Israel Land Authority) and in institutionalized racism and apartheid, the JNF and its affiliate organisations enjoy charitable status in over 50 countries.

7. Early day motion 1677, JEWISH NATIONAL FUND, Session: 2010-12“That this House welcomes the Stop the Jewish National Fund (JNF) Campaign launched on 30 March 2011 by the Palestinian Boycott National Committee, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and others to inform the public about the JNF - Karen Kayemet L'Yisrael, its ongoing illegal expropriation of Palestinian land, concealing of destroyed Palestinian villages beneath parks and forests, and prevention of refugees from returning to their homes; notes that the JNF's constitution is explicitly discriminatory by stating that land and property will never be rented, leased or sold to non-Jews; further notes that the UN rejected the JNF USA's application for consultative status with the Economic and Social Council on the ground that it violates the principles of the UN Charter on Human Rights; regrets that the Prime Minister is a JNF honorary patron; and believes that there is just cause to consider revocation of the JNF's charitable status in the UK.”http://www.parliament.uk/edm/2010-12/1677

Here's a letter which appeared in The Independent last week. I missed it at the time but caught it in The Week magazine:

So let me get this right. William Hague warns that Iran acquiring nuclear weapons would start a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Where is the sense of history? Fifty years ago, John F Kennedy was firmly opposed to Israel acquiring nuclear weapons for precisely that reason. By that measure, hasn't the good Mr Hague got cause and effect interchanged?

PH Ladbrooke

Cambridge

Tbe Independent headed the letter, Blind to history whereas The Week headed it, Nuclear muddle. There's no reference to the original article or letter to which PH Ladbroke was responding. I'm guessing it was this from Feb 18.

February 26, 2012

At each event the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs will be selling Atzmon’s CD “The Tide Has Changed” and his book The Wandering Who?—although as Prof. Garrison Fewell warns, when you finish reading the ­latter, you may likely “see a different face in the mirror.”
For more information call the Washington ­Report at (202) 939-6050 or visit www.wrmea.com or www.gilad.co.uk. To purchase Atzmon’s book visit www.middleeastbooks.com. Atzmon’s DC appearances are co-sponsored by the Washington Report, Deir Yassin ­Remembered, If Americans Knew and Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends. (The Washington Report )

I went to see The Death of Klinghoffer at The Coliseum last night. I'm just watching the trailer on youtube and I hear the director, Tom Morris, describing the opera as "powerfully evenhanded".

Others might say "annoyingly evenhanded" and still others would describe it as too in favour of one side or the other. There was one chap demonstrating outside with a placard saying that a disabled man had been murdered by terrorists for being a Jew and that we patrons should "enjoy your evening at the ENO". A woman told him that she had seen the opera before and that he should see it for himself and she offered to buy him a ticket. He refused.
John Adams has a huge reputation as a very accomplished composer. The librettist, Alice Goodman, was never commissioned again.

UPDATE: here's the first review I've seen. It's from The Guardian's Andrew Clements:

In the event it all passed off quite peacefully. The demonstration against the staging of The Death of Klinghoffer that had been predicted in some sections of the press appeared to be limited to one person standing outside the Coliseum and brandishing a rather small poster, and at the final curtain the composer, his work and English National Opera's production were all warmly received.

So 21 years after it was first seen in Brussels,John Adams's second opera has finally reached the London stage. This a fine, intelligent treatment of it, though some aspects inevitably underline the work's fundamental problems, which have nothing to do with its political agenda, whether real or imagined, and everything to do with the way in which the work is conceived dramatically, and the language in which Alice Goodman's libretto is couched.

For in many ways The Death of Klinghoffer is more a reflection on the infamous Palestinian hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean in 1985, and the subsequent death of one of its passengers, the Jewish, wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, than a depiction of the event itself. It's the absence of that narrative element in the text, and the effect that has on the music which Adams composed, that robs the work of a real dramatic spine. For the first act at least the score seems much closer to oratorio than opera, with much more meditation and recollection than real-time action, and the overwrought imagery and sheer opacity of Goodman's text only exacerbate it. The pace quickens in the second half – a narrative thread more or less runs through it – and the dramatic focus is sharper, but the final impression is blurred.

Tom Morris's production (designed by Tom Pye) works hard to compensate for the opera's failure to tell its own story. Significant dates are flashed up on the set, explanatory captions supply historical context, and if the effect is to make the piece seem more of a documentary than Adams and Goodman ever intended, then it's an unfortunate necessity. The stage pictures are economical, carefully managed and effective – the chorus unfurl green flags as Palestinians, carry olive trees as Israelis. Little is stylised, though some episodes are choreographed (byArthur Pita) and enough grainy realism remains to make the true nature of the tragedy vivid.

What emerges clearly too from the performance under Baldur Brönnimann is the sheer beauty of so much of Adams's score, with its dark-hued sonorities, chromatically inflected harmonies and keening instrumental lines. The great choruses that provide the opera's structural pillars are superbly sung by the ENO Chorus, though it's a real shame that the ravishing one that opens the second act has been cut here. All of the solo roles are taken memorably too, whether it's the cameos from Kathryn Harries as the Austrian woman, Lucy Schaufer as the Swiss grandmother, and Kate Miller-Heidke as the British dancing girl, or the major contributions from Christopher Magiera as the Captain, Richard Burkhard as the hijacker Mamoud, Michaela Martens as Marilyn Klinghoffer and especially Alan Opie as Leon Klinghoffer himself, who sings his final number, the Aria of the Falling Body, which Adams calls a gymnopédie, with devastating simplicity.

While the place in the repertory for The Death of Klinghoffer remains unclear – does it belong in the opera house or, perhaps slightly modified, in the concert hall? – ENO's production does underline its musical worth, and its timeless seriousness. It's a major achievement.

And it's one in the eye for the lobby. Zionists have worked hard to have this either not performed at all or panned by the critics. Andrew Clements's review judges it purely on artistic merit.

February 25, 2012

It appears that Israel is to coordinate this year's hasbara efforts to counter Israel Apartheid Week. Here"s Ha'aretz:

New York City native Avi Abelow is leaving his job, his wife and four children in Efrat to visit the state of California for 10 days. His plan - and that of nearly 100 other Israelis who are boarding flights this week to 20 cities in Europe, Africa and North America - is to talk. And to talk a lot.

"This is definitely a very unique situation," says Abelow, a 37-year-old movie producer and independent advocate for Israel, whose "Israel Straight Talk" Facebook page boasts nearly 14,000 "likes." "I don't know how many other countries can have this phenomenon of people basically leaving their lives, not getting reimbursed for the time lost, and taking the time to talk about their country."

Abelow and his colleagues have been designated the "Faces of Israel" in a Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Ministry initiative, which is deliberately timed to coincide with the eighth annual Israeli Apartheid Week in support of the Palestinian Civil Society's call for "Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions." A press release issued Wednesday by the ministry called it "anti-Israel Hate Week."

Here's a report just in from Associated Press under the headline, Israeli nixes solar energy for Palestinians:

Electricity from solar panels and wind turbines has revolutionized life in rural Palestinian herding communities: Machines, instead of hands, churn goat milk into butter, refrigerators store food that used to spoil and children no longer have to hurry to get their homework done before dark.

But the German-funded project, initiated by Israeli volunteers, is now in danger. Israeli authorities are threatening to demolish the installations in six of the 16 remote West Bank communities being illuminated by alternative energy, arguing the panels and turbines were installed without permits.

Ah, no permits, I see. But what's this?

At the same time, Israeli officials argue that the Palestinian herders of the southern West Bank are nomads with no legal claim to the lands they squat on.

Which roughly translated means they're Arabs and so can't get permits and because they can't get permits they can't settle and because they can't settle they are nomads and because they are nomads they can't get permits and, oh never mind.

Just so you know, dotted through the piece are references to something called "the peace process".

February 24, 2012

Ugly language and issues over cause and effect from one of the founding Fabians but see this from the Diary of Beatrice Webb anyway:

2 September 1929Roused by the tragic happenings in Palestine there has buzzed around him (Sidney Webb who worked at the Colonial Office) Jews and the admirers of Jews, great and small in a state of violent grief and agitation demanding revenge and compensation. It is noteworthy that no representative of the Arabs – not even a casual admirer of the Arabs – has appeared on the scene. What one gathers from these excited persons is that the British officials on the spot, are held to be perniciously pro-Arab – not because they love the Arab but because, for one reason or another, they hate the Jew …- this may or may not be true-. Is there any principle relating to the rights of peoples to the territory in which they happen to live? I admire Jews and dislike Arabs. But the Zionist movement seems to me a gross violition of the right of the native to remain where he was born and his father and grandfather were born – if there is such a right. To talk about the return of the Jew to the land of his inheritance after an absence of 2000 years seems to me sheer nonsense and hypocritical nonsense. From whom were descended those Russian and Polish Jews? The principle which is really being asserted is the principle of selecting races for particular territories according to some peculiar needs or particular fitness. Or it may be some ideal of communal life to be realized by subsidised migration. But this process of artificially creating new communities of immigrants, brought from any parts of the world, is rather hard on the indigenous natives! The White Settlers in Kenya would seem to have as much right, on this assumption to be where they are, as the Russian Jews in Jerusalem! Yet exactly the same people – for instance Josiah Wedgwood – who denounce the White Settlers of Kenya as unwarranted intruders, are hotly in favour of the bran new Jewish colonies in Palestine…But the case for the Arab has not yet been heard; whilst the case for the Jew has been vehemently and powerfully pressed on the Government. The Zionist Movement and the mandate for a National Home for the Jews in Palestine seems to have originated in some such unequal pressure exercised by the wealthy and ubiquitous Jew on the one hand and the poor and absent Arab on the other.

Many thanks to my friend, Georgina, for typing this out. As Georgina said in her email, plus ça change.

No real surprise here except for the guy's openness and sporadic displays of self-awareness. See this from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency:

The first time I met Arieh O’Sullivan was in the predawn darkness of a winter morning in Jerusalem in 1997, when he came to pick me up in a jeep emblazoned with the Confederate flag on its spare tire.......

O’Sullivan, 50, has moved on in his career. He is now the Mideast bureau chief for The Media Line, a nonprofit that supplies news outlets with stories about the Middle East. But a few things have stuck with him: his sharp eye, a commitment to journalism and that jeep with the Confederate flag. It also has a statue of General Robert E. Lee glued to the dashboard.

“I’ve always been proud of the fact that I come from the South,” said O’Sullivan, who was born and raised in New Orleans and moved to Mississippi before making aliyah in 1981. “There’s some kind of kinship between Israel and the Confederacy: Both are mired in self-pity, victimology and obsession with history.”

"People think the Sons of Confederate Veterans is just a bunch of Ku Klux Klan types and rednecks," O'Sullivan told me in an interview a few weeks before his induction. "I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I’m going to show that it's not an extremist organization but just one to remember veterans who served in the South."

What can you say about a guy who joins an organisation not knowing whether or not if it's "just a bunch of Ku Klux Klan types".

At 6am on Monday February 13th, the Israeli authorities demolished the Madaa creative centre and children’s playground in Silwan, East Jerusalem. The demolitions, which will make way for a controversial tourist site, were carried out using UK-made JCB equipment.

The playground was the last children’s play area in Silwan, and built with funding from the American NGO MECA for Peace. This demolition comes on top of eviction orders which have been issued to 88 families in the Silwan area. The Silwan district of East Jerusalem now faces the biggest mass evictions since 1967, with over 1,000 people set to be displaced. Any such demolitions are prohibited by the fourth Geneva Convention and therefore illegal under international humanitarian law.

The world is watching what is happening in Silwan. It is up to us to show the Israeli authorities that the international community condemns any further demolitions or use of intimidation in Silwan. This is critical, since the community in Silwan will be rebuilding the playground and creative centre in time for their Mother’s Day celebrations in March.

February 22, 2012

Good news from across the pond, sadly tainted by threats and bogus allegations of antisemitism. First the good news from Ha'aretz:

Grammy-winning jazz singer Cassandra Wilson has called off her scheduled concert in Holon tonight, after receiving requests from pro-Palestinian activists asking that she join an artistic boycott of Israel.

Wilson, an American jazz singer known for her unmistakably husky voice, had been scheduled to perform at the Holon International Women’s Festival.

I've covered the dodgy definition so many times it's a bore I know but see how a zionist has now upped its status from a document hanging in EU cyberspace to something which "the EU states". Long live the UCU!

Oh no, another sickening display of grovelling by Obama is in the pipeline. Here's The Boston Globe:

The White House says President Barack Obama will address the annual conference of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, next month.

The White House says Obama will speak at the conference on March 4. He will hold meetings the following day with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will also be in Washington to attend the conference.

The president’s election-year remarks to AIPAC come as Republican presidential candidates question his support for Israel and his handling of Iran’s nuclear threat. Obama says he is a staunch supporter of Israel.

So what's he going to say, "hi guys, I'm the chap who killed Bin Laden"?

Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan announced Tuesday that he will be ending his 66-day hunger strike after Israel agreed to release him.

The Islamic Jihad operative, who has been fighting a provision that allows Israel to hold detainees for months or even years without trial or formal charges, reached an agreement with the state prosecution less than an hour before his case was discussed at the Supreme Court.....

Adnan continued his hunger strike longer than any Palestinian detainee before him. His doctors warned this week that the 33-year-old might die soon.

The hunger strike has transformed Adnan into a Palestinian hero, with thousands protesting in support of the once obscure bearded baker. The Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad had vowed revenge if Adnan died, possibly by firing rockets into Israel from Gaza. The group has killed dozens of Israelis in suicide bombings and other attacks. Adnan was once a spokesman for the group. It's unclear if he ever participated in any attacks.

From tragedy to farce, the colonialist practice of dividing indigenous people and dominating them through their own "elites" comeptes with the Cirque du Soleil for the best spectacle in town. Unfortunately for the clowns of Cirque du Soleil, despite being far more entertaining, they are paid far less than the clowns of the global Cirque des Indigenes.

Canadian First Nations "grand Chief" David Harper visited the Israeli Knesset in one of those junket trips the Zionists are famous for. Here's the news:

Among the First Nations delegation who visited Israel's parliament were representatives from the indigenous peoples of Australia, the Fiji Islands, Samoa and Greenland, as well as Inuit natives, a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples who live in the Arctic regions of Canada, spokeswoman from the group told Arutz Sheva.

Their visit to Israel was organized by a Knesset lobby which strives to promote relations with Christian communities around the world. The natives toured the Knesset and met with the Deputy Minister for Development of the Negev and Galilee, Ayoob Kara. (Israel National News)

Local clown Ayoob Kara explained why colonized people should cheer colonizers. Only the big plastic red nose was missing. Have a barf bag ready and hit play on the clip below.

A Response to Norman Finkelstein

Virginia Tilley

19 February 2012

Responding to bizarre statements always risks magnifying their exposure and importance. Hence I wouldn’t normally respond to Norman Finkelstein’s startling 32-minute video attack on the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, which was recently posted on YouTube to considerable fanfare by Zionist blogs. Some other good writers have taken him on, like Sean O'Neill, so I could leave it there. But having watched the whole video-taped interview as well as the 5-minute version that someone cobbled together of its “highlights”, I’m sufficiently irritated to respond. Partly I'm concerned to counter some fallacies he promotes that are floating around more widely, but I also feel obliged to challenge people who use the worst conceits of the academy—“it’s science!” “it’s law!”—to trash people’s work while abusing the real rigor and subtlety of academe. In fact, some of Finkelstein’s points are flat wrong, others partly wrong, some partly right and others flat right. I’ll start with the wrong ones.

First, it’s seriously irritating that Finkelstein goes on about international law in ways that reduce international law to a parody of itself. You can’t take some law and not all law, he says, as though law is a fixed box set. For one thing, he cherry-picks law with abandon himself, as I'll discuss later. But mainly, international law isn’t a frozen set of rules. Like any law, it’s a moving target. Rules and norms develop incrementally, and are interpreted and reinterpreted over time, as conditions and needs change. For example, when the United Nations voted for partitioning Palestine in 1947, apartheid in South Africa hadn’t yet been invented. Within a few more years, South Africa’s first apartheid laws were on the books, yet it was another decade before the UN began to react seriously against it and 1973 before the UN made apartheid a crime against humanity. Today, the prohibition of apartheid is codified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and what Israel is doing can be defined and denounced in terms that did not exist a half-century ago.

This is why Finkelstein botches international law in holding that, because “Israel is a state,” no one has a jot to say about the situation of Arab citizens inside Israel. Even when he talks about the 1947 partition resolution of the UN, Resolution 181, which recommended partitioning Mandate Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, he gets it wrong. He forgets that Resolution 181 specified plainly that neither state could discriminate on the basis of religion or race. When the General Assembly admitted Israel as a member of the UN in 1949, on the basis of this history, its members relied (gullibly) on Israel’s hints that it would not discriminate against Arabs inside the state. So Israel’s discriminatory laws flew in the face of international opinion even in 1949, let alone sixty-plus years later, when human rights law has gained so much more strength in prohibiting racial discrimination and apartheid. Today, no state anywhere in the world today has a “right” to discriminate among its citizens on the basis of race, religion, or ethnic or national origin. Israel has signed onto the international conventions which explicitly prohibit such discrimination and is bound by its obligations on this score.

So if Finkelstein and others try to rely on diplomatic recognition of Israel to argue that international law has nothing to say about discrimination against Arabs in Israel, they are flat wrong, because it is flatly prohibited. Yes, Israel is recognized as a state, but so is South Africa, and that didn’t stop the entire world from slamming apartheid as the racist abomination it was and insisting that the apartheid regime be dismantled.

Finkelstein is also flat wrong on another historical point: that the international legal framework for resolving the conflict has always been partition into two states. For evidence, he mentions that when Arafat—that legendary legal mind— proposed two states in 1989, he invoked the 1947 partition resolution as unfinished business of the conflict. Yes, Arafat did cite this, but his point was precisely to jump back over four decades during which the opposite was true. From 1947 to 1989, Israel flatly rejected creation of a Palestinian state anywhere in Mandate Palestine as an intolerable threat to Israel. The formal public position of the PLO from its creation until 1988 was also one state. Since 1967, Israel has made deadly clear—in rhetoric, laws, maps, settlement construction, military rule and anything else we might care to check—its intention is to keep all of Mandate Palestine under its supreme control. And in all that time, the UN Security Council said nothing about two states or even about Palestinian national rights. That’s precisely why the Oslo Accords manifested to naive international public as a “historic compromise”, blah blah.

Finkelstein calls for us to stick with this “historic compromise”. He dresses down the BDS movement for not doing so and for seeking instead, if implicitly, to “eliminate” or “abolish Israel”. We are all so sick of this language that I couldn’t normally find energy to write this sentence, except that he extends the point to delegitimizing the BDS organizers by saying that they “don’t want Israel to exist”. So let’s go through it one more time: this old Zionist chestnut makes open hash of international law by deliberately confusing two things—Israel as a modern territorial state and Israel as a Jewish state. Finkelstein’s critique of BDS doctrine is sort of right: yes, taken as a whole (as I agree with him we should take it), the comprehensive effect of the BDS agenda would “abolish Israel” as a Jewish state.

But is this logical implication—based entirely on international human rights law, by the way—illegitimate? I’d say, damn straight, Israel as a Jewish state must be abolished, just as white South Africa had to be “abolished”, and for the same reason—because ethnic states simply can’t exist without discrimination and oppression. But does this mean abolishing Israel as a modern territorial state? Of course not, just as South Africa was not “abolished” in this sense. So language about “eliminating Israel” is just pointless sophistry—scare-mongering, rhetorical sabotage—as Finkelstein well knows. Indeed, accepting his claim to senior experience of this conflict, we must assume he knows all about this manipulative language and his using it therefore can only mirror his accusations of hypocrisy back on himself.

Indeed, it is Finkelstein himself who avoids being honest—just saying straight out that he wants Israel to remain a Jewish state and won’t accept as "reasonable" any program that disagrees. Instead, he cites “international law” selectively and thinly as a cover for this. He also claims that the BDS movement contradicts “international law,” such as UN Security Council resolutions which call for creating two states. Yet here again, he cherry picks, and hoists himself on his own petard. He cites Resolution 1515 of 2003, which calls for two states, as “international law” yet then disparages Resolution 194, which calls for return of Palestinian refugees, as “indefensible”. Here more sophistry infuses his objection that mass return of millions of Palestinian refugees to Palestine would be entirely "unreasonable". For one thing, at least one study has found that the number of Palestinians actually wanting to return would be in the hundreds of thousands, not millions. But, in any case, defending the principle of Palestinian return hardly precludes sensible policies to manage the pragmatic realities of it, and activists firing questions from audiences in Finkelstein's talks (his example) hardly define the range of negotiation that must go into such questions. The very complexity of resolutions, diplomatic initiatives and contradictory clauses in the full history of the conflict precludes table-thumping about any one of them. All are necessarily subject to the diplomatic process, power politics, real politik, geographic constraints and evolving international views. Taking bits and pieces in isolation to call some “unreasonable” and others “international law” is meaningless.

It is indeed by viewing all this as a whole process, contradictions and all, that the “compromise” suggested by the Oslo Accords is revealed as a sham. Not least, Finkelstein ignores the glaring fact, hardly irrelevant to his claims about international consensus, that Israel itself has never agreed to a two–state solution. Aside from one sentence in a letter by Ariel Sharon, which was never formally endorsed by the Israeli Cabinet, Israel has never signed onto any document in any way that actually commits its government to create two states. Nor has it ever recognized the Palestinian people as a people or endorsed the Palestinian right to self-determination. The BDS movement might usefully address this farce and open discussions toward accepting that "Israel" now embraces all of Mandate Palestine and therefore must be reconceived as a secular-democratic state. But until that happens, the BDS movement can't be criticized for standing silent on a geographic version of Israel that Israel refuses to hold for itself. Here Finkelstein's citing the International Court of Justice on the question of where Israel's exists is only more cherry-picking: a mountain of international diplomacy confirms that Israel's final borders have not been set and the question remains a "final status" issue.

Finkelstein claims that BDS organisers will not admit to the true goals of BDS (the elimination of Israel) because they don’t want to split the movement. This isn’t a fact so much as an interpretation, but it’s easy to agree with him. He’s flat right that the three-tier goals of the BDS movement—end the occupation, return of refugees, equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel—would “eliminate Israel” as a Jewish state. I’ve pointed this out myself, and am convinced for several reasons that the BDS organizers are fully aware of it. And I too have been bothered by the elision, but on reasoning opposite to Finkelstein’s. I think that a strategic fuzziness on this point deprives the BDS movement of its greatest potential, which is the unassailable moral force gained by clearly rejecting discrimination in all its forms and fighting for creation of a non-racial state, as in South Africa.

Finkelstein, by contrast, denounces the campaign’s silence on this point as deceptive, and failing to accept the inevitable. In doing so, he tramples all over principles of political activism as freely as he abuses international law. His first fallacy is to deride the BDS movement’s fogginess on its ultimate vision of one secular-democratic state as “childish” and “silly.” In this view, he is strangely naive, for a political scientist, about the politics of liberation movements. It’s a very old and time-honoured method in building mass movements to tread lightly around issues that divide people until consensus and trust build to the point where more difficult internal differences can be productively debated. The Zionist movement itself has done this from its earliest years, in skirting deep internal divisions about Judaism and Jewish social values, but we can spot the same manoeuvring in any liberation movement over the past few centuries. So it’s hardly "hypocritical" that the BDS leadership is treading gently by not confronting its constituency with divisive issues until the time has matured for some respectful internal debate about what “eliminating Israel” will actually mean to the future and well-being of the Jewish national home in Palestine. Perhaps it’s time for those discussions to be opened, but meanwhile it’s truly silly to call the delay “dishonest”. (Perhaps Finkelstein’s sensitivity on this score traces to Maoism, to which, by his own account, he was loyal for decades longer than most people. Once in a cult, always see cults?)

Finkelstein’s second fallacy about BDS is in disparaging its few “successes”. Here he fails to grasp the essential character of a BDS campaign. Although any such campaign naturally seeks and celebrates landmark victories, its true success is not measured by the number of companies pulling out of contracts but by the incremental growth of world public opinion. Let’s get this straight: the primary purpose of BDS is public education. This is mostly an intangible or qualitative matter, yet of immense importance, as Israel knows full well: hence Israeli state rhetoric these days barely mentions “terror” and focuses almost exclusively on “delegitimation”. I’d suggest it’s a far better indication of the BDS movement’s success that Israeli ambassadors, meeting in Israel over the New Year's break, reported that they had never before felt their diplomatic environments so chilly. Sean O'Neall has observed the same constraints confronting the stumbling Birthright Israel program, and other observers attest similarly.

Finkelstein’s third fallacy regarding activism is to protest that, if it’s honest about its “eliminate Israel” goals, the BDS will never reach a “mainstream public”. This objection about mainstream opinion, which he repeats several times, is bizarre on its face. Since when do human rights campaigns adjust their arguments to please mainstream opinion? Changing mainstream opinion is their very task. If activists took mainstream opinion as the proper guide to moral action, we would never have had the anti-slavery abolition movement, or the women’s suffrage movement, and apartheid would flourish in South Africa to this day. Indeed, we wouldn’t have most human rights campaigns. The toughest ones, which are often the greatest ones, must often start small and grow slowly.

Still, maybe Finkelstein is unintentionally helpful in drawing our attention to a seamier camp of human rights activism, by publicly positioning himself in it: some activists do tune their positions to what they think the majority wants to hear, eschewing stands that “lack support”. They may believe themselves pragmatic, but I call these folks “human rights entrepreneurs”, as they are essentially market-oriented. Like courtiers, they position themselves just behind the cutting edge, with a keen eye for trends, so they can surf a wave they didn’t actually have the courage or insight to create themselves. In other words, they are not guided by the moral principles of human rights but by how the rhetoric “sells”—how a human-rights posture gets them into the "club", invited to conferences and onto speaker circuits, and draws funds to their NGOs (although I make no assertion about Finkelstein on the money question). I don’t work that way, and I’d submit that the great human rights campaigns of human history have never built that way. They build on principle, and the greatest movements, like the campaigns to end slavery and apartheid, hammered away for decades through fog and darkness, eventually succeeding when moral authority and changing conditions finally synced. So were these all “cults” during those dark years? If so, call me a cultist.

I'm not saying Finkelstein is a money-grubber. On the contrary, he is clearly saying what he truly thinks, and, setting aside his unnecessarily rude and insulting language, I respect his independence of mind. But his position is still entrepreneurial in approaching human rights audiences as markets, in the guise of being pragmatic. If he remains dedicated to this approach, perhaps he can remember the power of marketing: persuading people that they want something. That’s how the ANC did it, anyway, eventually selling its idea of a shared state to what looked for many decades like unassailable white rejection.

In stark contrast to Finkelstein's argument, human rights campaigns must indeed assume, as a premise essential to their work, that public opinion—here, Jewish-Israeli opinion and Palestinian public opinion—is not fixed, but responds to persuasion, events and conditions. Especially, it responds to messages from the other side. A clarion call by the ANC for a shared state is what tipped South African apartheid leaders, once their world crumbled, to give up apartheid. When Palestinians decide collectively that their future is a reunited and shared Palestine, in which all citizens are equal in dignity and rights, the political chemistry of the entire conflict will change. By creating a “mainstream public” for themselves, they will ultimately create it for all.

This brings us to the question of leadership. One point I think Finkelstein did get right, and perhaps it was time to break ground by saying it. He decried the BDS Council for presuming to direct solidarity activities elsewhere. He mentions its squashing his own initiative in Gaza, which was a scandal, but also its claiming authority over initiatives by solidarity people anywhere in the world. I have to agree with him on this one: I’ve never seen anything like it, either—not with the Vietnamese, the ANC, Sandinistas, the Mayas, the PLO, East Timor, or any liberation movement I’ve ever supported or communicated with. The BDS Council is an able body of activists promoting an international campaign, but Finkelstein is right: it’s no more than an unelected, unrepresentative bunch of volunteers, and it has zip to say about what anybody else does, ever, anywhere, in support of the Palestinian people. Its only legitimate role is to serve as a resource, not an authority. Language I’ve heard by international activists on this score—that “proposals” for activity this or that must be “brought to the BDS Council” for “deliberation” and decisions about whether they should go forward—is gobsmacking and raises my political-alarm antennae. The same ugly impression was gained by AdamSchatz in the London Review of Books:

The idea of living with Jews—a central tenet of large sections of the Palestinian movement during the First Intifada—gave way to a vision of struggle against a faceless coloniser. When Israel began to build the wall, Palestinians retreated in pride and defiance behind a separation wall of their own. Many now refuse to associate even with those Israelis who are in sympathy with the Palestinian struggle. Amira Hass, the great left-wing Israeli journalist for Haaretz, who is based in Ramallah, was prevented from studying Arabic at Birzeit; Daniel Barenboim has been vilified by some leaders of the boycott movement on the grounds that the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Arab-Israeli youth orchestra he created with Edward Said, is promoting “normalisation” with the Zionist state. One BDS leader told me with eerie self-assurance that Said would have shut down the orchestra in line with BDS demands. There was even a debate within BDS about whether the Bilin protests ought to be boycotted because of the participation of Israeli Jews who might call themselves Zionists. ‘These people don’t go to Bilin, [Palestinian lawyer Diana] Buttu said. ‘They prefer to issue fatwas from their laptops, and if you question the logic behind the fatwas, you get called a traitor. [emphasis added]’

Who the flippin’ hell is the BDS Council to shut down the Barenboim orchestra, or turn away Amira Hass or anyone else from Birzeit University, or—god help us—presume to assert that Edward Said, of all people, would kow-tow to its puerile diktat? What random NGO coalition is authorized to silence dissent by denouncing people as traitors? This is not just arrogance but dangerous arrogance, ringing of proto-fascism—centralisation by authoritarian personalities, claiming doctrinal and strategic control over a liberation movement in the name of ideological purity with racist overtones, although they have no popular mandate whatever, not even the democratic figleaf provided by the (long-defunct) Palestine National Council. The dangers of this distortion must not be underestimated and further submission to its intimidation tactics is unwise. Perhaps Finkelstein has done the solidarity movement a service, after all, by throwing open a window for true Palestinian democrats to confront this tendency and nip it in the bud. Sometimes a bull in a china shop does create an opportunity to sweep out the place.

UPDATE: I've paid more attention to the comments than I did to Virginia Tilley's article. Here's Gabriel Ash's comment to this post:

Tilley has its good points however, she seems to have a beef with PACBI, that seems as personal and as inappropriate as Finkelstein's. First, the Gaza March was not "squashed" by the BNC, and the shame is on Tilley for using this language. Some members of the BNC, speaking for themselves, criticized some aspects of it, constructively and politely, and most of the organizers accepted the validity of the criticism, except NF, who publicly tried to undermine the march while leaving the organizing committee. It is sad to see that Tilley supports NF's behavior and find faults with the very fact that Palestinian public intellectuals would dare comment on what they see as shortcomings of a solidarity campaign. It feels like a case of academics sticking together in defending the right to behave irresponsibly and without accountability, their professional sin.

Second, preventing Amira Hass from learning at Bir Zeit, if it happened (and I was told it happened before BDS anyway), has nothing to do with BDS as such action is quite explicitly against the PACBI academic and cultural boycott guidelines. Obviously, there have been boycotts of Israelis before, including as part of the Arab boycott, and Tilley has as much right as anybody to suggest that that such boycotts are not helpful. In fact, I agree. But Tilley uses this event to smear activists who obviously had nothing to do with it. It seems that both NF and Tilley have found in the Palestinian initiators of the BDS call a scapegoat for every Palestinian who takes a political position they disapprove of. One wonders what is the motivation for this. Is the very presence of assertive Palestinians in the movements making them uncomfortable?

Regarding The exchange between PACBI and the Diwan Orchestra, I think PACBI is right. The Diwan Orchestra does normalize the occupation, not because it brings Israelis and Palestinians together, but because it refuses to make any political statements when it does it. While the orchestra does little damage on its own, and is certainly not in the same league as, say, Elbit, I can say from experience that artists and especially aparatchiks in the cultural field use Barenboim's name as a fig leaf that allows them to argue that they "promote peace" and "fight against the occupation" when all they do is promoting Israeli propaganda. And if the orchestra doesn't want to be used in this way, it is certainly not taking any stand against it. Adam Schatz claim that Barenboim was "vilified" is indeed an example of what he condemns.

Finally, she is right that the BNC should not be in a position to decide how solidarity activists do their work in other countries. But neither she, nor NF, give any evidence that the BNC dictates solidarity. Tilley gives an example of Western activists asking for guidance with what might be uncharitably described as an excess of deference. If Western activists lose sight of their own autonomy, she should criticize them, not the BNC. But it is also worth remembering that part of the prehistory of the BDS call was Western activists complaining to Palestinians over the absence of guidance and a coherent strategy that can serve as a pole for organizing solidarity. The BDS council is, as Tilley suggests, a very important resource to solidarity activists. Providing needed guidance can easily slip into issuing orders, just as autonomy can easily slip into Western patronizing of Palestinians. The relation between the two sides has to be kept through dialogue in the right zone, and criticism of it for getting out of that zone is useful when it is done with care and respect, exactly the kind of care and respect that is found in the letter of those Palestinian intellectuals who criticized the Gaza March, and is absent from both NF's and Tilley's interventions.

UPDATE 2: Here's further comment from David Landy:

This is a disappointing article by Virginia Tilley. Her points about Norman and THE LAW are well made – similar to Lenin’shttp://leninology.blogspot.co... in fact, and not too far away from Max Ajl who has offered the best commentary on this affair here http://mrzine.monthlyreview.or... (Myself, when listening to Finkelstein’s repeated invocation of the majesty of the law, I was reminded of the Kafka short story in The Trial where a man is kept waiting his whole life before the outer gates of the law, a gate he can never enter, a gate created just for him. And in the course of that wasted life he is reduced from pleading with the gatekeeper of The Law to pleading with the fleas in the gatekeeper’s beard. The fate, I suppose, of those who put all their faith in The Law)

However, Virginia’s attack on PACBI and the BNC is disturbing. Gabriel accurately explains how unjustified the attack is and I’ve nothing to add there. But why does Virginia Tilley, a long-term advocate of Palestinian rights (and the one-state solution), make such an attack? I think it is because PACBI are trying to create a leadership role for themselves in the movement. However, unlike Virginia Tilley I don’t find this problematic, but necessary. With the fighting between Hamas and Fatah, and their lack of popular legitimacy, a huge leadership gap has opened up – one which had the power to paralyse Palestinian solidarity in other countries. This is because the question arises as to what foundational authority the activism of those who don’t worship before the alter of The Law (human rights or international) rely on. The Palestinian people? But who represents them, if not their elected representatives?

Here is where the BNC comes in, representing Palestinian civil society, giving the solidarity movement both the authority/legitimacy to act, as well the direction in which to act. Without doubt this ad hoc arrangement can be criticized; it is a terribly imperfect solution to the problem of Palestinian representation. The BNC, in short, doesn’t replace the PLO. Nor, as far as I’m aware, is any BNC member arguing that it should. It is, hopefully, a temporary solution. And as a leadership of sorts, it has adopted the role of urging solidarity organisations down certain routes, arguing against other routes (notably against a depoliticisation of the struggle, a reduction of it to humanitarian arguments, with Palestinians as victims to be rescued).

As I’ve said, I’ve no problem with this, partly because I agree with their analysis, but more because I believe the way they are starting to provide leadership and making the solidarity movement more coherent to be absolutely vital – giving justification and direction to our work. Without doubt they are doing so from a position of shaky authority themselves, which is a problem. But to argue, as Virginia Tilley does, that the Sandanistas or PLO or ANC didn’t try to claim similar authority (or in fact, far more authority) over solidarity movements and direct their actions is gobsmackingly false. This is my problem with her article, not that she expresses problems with the BNC – and I don’t know if they stem from personal arguments as Gabriel says, or political disagreements. But that she extends her criticism from questioning their tactics to questioning their legitimacy as a ‘random NGO coalition’ who should just shut up about whatever the international solidarity movement does. This is deeply unhelpful, arguing for an inchoate movement.

This condemnation of the BNC may derive from the black and white way she seems to see the struggle. Divisions are continually made in the article between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. For instance, she divides between’ good’ human rights campaigners who aspire towards the condition of marketing executives, and ‘bad’ ones whose greatest ambition is to be beggars towards those in power. In reality, all groups trying to change the world need to trim their sails somewhat, and there are more gradations in how people address power and the public than this Manichean division.

However, where my attitude changed from disagreement to annoyance at these slapdash categorizations was when she caricatured those who support the boycott 100% as keyboard warriors – sneering that ‘these people don’t go to Bilin’. Contrasting boycott action with the direct action of the weekly demos at Bil’in is an unacceptable and false division, one which condemns boycott and fetishises this direct action in a way that is unhelpful to its goals. That she needed to drag in a Palestinian voice to give this opinion some spurious authority only underlines its weakness.

I would agree, most friends in the movement would agree that some tactical flexibility is needed in the boycott campaign – indeed in their so-called ‘fatwa’ against the WEDO orchestra (http://jewssansfrontieres.blog..., PACBI also recognises this. (It is ironic but unsurprising that those who are most dogmatic on this front, in my experience, are those who have experienced Israeli brutality face-to-face, or in other words those who have been involved in direct actions.) There is nothing wrong with calling for flexibility and arguing with more dogmatic people, there is something very wrong in labelling those who are less flexible than us proto-fascists.

The one thing that is to be said for Virginia Tilley’s article, like Norman Finkelstein’s original intervention, is that it might encourage open debate about the goals, leadership and future of the movement. However this discussion, if it is to succeed, cannot proceed by invoking caricatures in the way that her article does.